The Street I Mowed the Day I Got Home

When I came around the near side of the house I could see Grandma on the porch. She lifted her tea to me a little, and I lifted my chin back.

That was the whole conversation, and it was plenty.

I did the back. There was more of it and it was rougher, up by the garden where she used to put tomatoes before her knees quit letting her.

I ran the lines straight anyway. I trimmed in close around the clothesline poles and the air conditioner and the old dog run that had not held a dog since Biscuit died.

I did it right, the way four hundred dollars a month ought to buy and never had.

By the time I shut the mower off and stood there breathing in her finished yard, it looked like a yard again. Striped and even and clean, the edges crisp along the walk.

Grandma clapped her hands together once, soft, like she did at my ballgames.

“Lord, that looks nice,” she called. “Come get some tea before you fall down.”

I went up on the porch and drank a whole glass of her sweet tea in about four swallows. She looked at my yard with me, and she was happy. I could see she was happy.

But I was not done. I had been standing in that yard looking down the street while I trimmed, and I had counted.

Miss Edna

There were nine houses on our side of Sycamore and most of them had a widow in them.

That is just how a street like ours goes. The men work hard and go first, and the women stay on in the houses they raised their families in.

The grass keeps growing whether there is a man left to cut it or not.

Miss Edna next door was eighty-one. Across and down was Mrs. Pruett, no relation to my gunny, whose husband had been the mail carrier.

There was the Settle place, and old Dorothy Kincaid who taught my dad in the third grade, and two or three more.

I knew for a fact Ray did not cut any of theirs. I also knew their grass was high, every lawn on the street shaggy and seeding in the July heat.

The Hobbs kid had gone off to football camp, and nobody else had come around.

So I rolled Grandma’s mower down her drive and across to Miss Edna’s.

Miss Edna was on her porch snapping beans into a bowl. She watched me come up her walk and got a look like she could not place me, and then she could.

“Hunter Lowe,” she said. “Is that Lou’s Hunter? Home from the service?”

“Yes ma’am. Got in last night.” I nodded at her yard. “I’m cutting Grandma’s this morning and I had the mower out. Thought I’d get yours too, if that’s all right.”